Our old friend Radisson, from the time we last saw him--when 'the Committee had discourse with him till dinner'--lived on in London, receiving a quarterly allowance of £12 10s. from the Company; occasional gratuities for his services, and presents of furs to Madame Radisson are also recorded. The last entry of the payment of his quarterly allowance is dated March 29, 1710. Then, on July 12, comes a momentous entry: 'the Sec. is ordered to pay Mr Radisson's widow as charity the sum of £6.' At some time between March 29 and July 12 the old pathfinder had set out on his last journey. Small profit his heirs reaped for his labours. Nineteen years later, September 24, 1729, the secretary was again ordered to pay 'the widow of Peter Radisson £10 as charity, she being very ill and in great want.' Meanwhile hostilities had been resumed between France and England; but the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 brought the game of war again to a pause and restored Hudson Bay to England. The Company received back all its forts on the Bay; but the treaty did not define the boundaries to be observed between the fur traders of Quebec pressing north and the fur traders of the Bay pressing south, and this unsettled point proved a source of friction in after years. After the treaty the adventurers deemed it wise to strengthen all their forts. Moose, Albany, and Nelson, and two other forts recently established--Henley House and East Main--were equipped with stone bastions; and when Churchill was built later, where Munck the Dane had wintered, its walls of solid stone were made stronger than Quebec's, and it was mounted with enough large guns to withstand a siege of European fleets of that day. The Company now regularly sent ships to Russia; and from Russia the adventurers must have heard of Peter the Great's plan to find the North Passage. The finding of the Passage had been one of the reasons for the granting of the charter, and the fur buyers' petition against the charter had set forth that small effort had been made in that direction. Now, at Churchill, Richard Norton and his son Moses, servants of the Company, had heard strange rumours from the Indians of a region of rare metals north-west inland. All these things the governor on the Bay, James Knight, pondered, as he cruised up and down from Albany to Churchill. Then the gold fever beset the Company. They sent for Knight. He was commissioned on June 3, 1719, to seek the North-West Passage, and, incidentally, to look for rare minerals.